


Real

by Phlyarologist



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:46:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2746484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There comes a point when such distinctions cease to matter.  Set during TFI.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Real

He was not, after all, a fool.

He had been dead before, and the experience had not impressed him. He had been to Hell more times than anyone should expect to, unless perhaps they were a real estate agent. The knowledge was comforting in its way, but, most importantly, it was also irrelevant. He would not be repeating the trip (or not yet, at any rate), due to the simple fact that none of this was real.

He had lost sight of that a time or two down the decades. The mind has a troublesome habit of wanting to believe what the senses present it. But he knew better. You didn't just wake up in a field and go on your merry way. No one offered you your heart's desire who had any intention of giving it to you – the phrase itself was a dead giveaway, fairy-story rubbish that all but shouted “here there be lessons to be learned.”

Evidence suggested, moreover, that the typical human heart wanted more than one thing. There should be no singular “heart's desire.”

In that and in other ways, he was not typical.

It was not real. All of this was an elaborate con. He had reminded himself of this on a daily (and then a weekly, but never less than twice-monthly) basis for years now. He’d made preparations, hidden a legitimate experiment here and there for as long as he was forced to act out this farce. He wouldn't be caught unawares when it all came crashing down; he would return to the real world having at least learned something for his pains. And going through an entire lifetime knowing it could not be legitimate was, to be sure, tedious.

It wasn't real. And as soon as he saw the look in her eyes, he knew what the whole ruse had been for.

Or that was how he might choose to remember it, after, when he couldn't avoid remembering it. In truth, when her eyes opened, when he realized what it was she saw – not a stranger, but something worse –

He knew better, damn it all. The very idea that he would be taken in was insulting to his intelligence. Nyarlothotep wouldn't have let him go so easily, with or without the secret of reanimation in a tidy little envelope. If anything, such a pretty pre-packaged solution had been the final nail in the coffin. It didn’t work that way. Nothing ever had.

But that had been so long ago. And it wasn’t as if the answer had been handed him for free - he’d had only the foundations, only a reasonable start, and labored for years for the rest. The daily realities of his research, as youth and then middle age slipped away unheeded, did much to obscure its suspicious origins.

And after all that time, he did not have it in him to see her looking at him with something like pity and something like contempt and account it as nothing. He was incapable of believing anything but that this counted, that his only chance had been expended for this.

Reason argued otherwise. Reason held no sway.

So: she was on a train going away from here, and he stared dispassionately at the last of his notebooks. In the end, did it matter? If he was right, he and a certain elder god had unfinished business, all the more so for what had transpired in this stupid pocket reality of his. If he was wrong -

her expression of bewilderment, the hesitation as she reached out to him, and how throughout the whole ordeal she'd been so unbelievably _polite_

\- the course was the same.

He threw the notebook into the fireplace with its fellows and, once satisfied it had caught (in case this was the real world, in case it had all been for nothing), took up his trusted Webley.

And Johannes Cabal died, an old and hollow man.

And opened his eyes, younger and furious.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "Suicide" over at Gen Prompt Bingo.
> 
> ...And I'm barely restraining myself from ruining the mood with a fussy aside about the spelling of Nyarlathotep. (Part of me says "don't be pedantic." Another part of me says "if not now, _when?_ ")


End file.
